What’s this all about?
Alright, now that you’ve met everyone, here’s what we’re going to do here. We’re gonna grow some food.
Simple enough right? I thought so.
We’re all just trying to gain some control over what we put into our bodies, and meet our own needs. We figure this is the most logical first step. We have dirt, we have sunshine, and we have time. The time part is very limited of course, but we’re going to make it happen. To put it into one sentence, this is the beginning our journey into Self Sustainability.
We’re not exactly Tin-Foil hat wearing folks, but we do fall into the category of “preppers” a bit. We’ll be avoiding the political gloom and doom stuff on here, but you may see the occasional post regarding disaster preparedness and stuff like that. This part of our personalities likely ties back to our parents, their parents, and beyond. Folks who lived through things like the Great Depression, and just general hard times have a different outlook on food and preparedness. Mix that in with some of the hippie new-age views of the Gardening in the ‘Burbs family, and you get what you see here; Four folks who want to know what they’re eating, where it came from, and have some stashed away for later.
In addition to the normal gardening stuff, you’ll get to enjoy some of our “contraptions”. Jeremy and Mike grew up with little money to spare. As their parents would quickly point out they were never hungry and always had everything they needed in life, but that’s not to say they had a lot left over. With that came the need to fix things when they broke, and make do with what they had. This is fairly common in rural America, but it’s lost when you get to the ‘Burbs and ‘Urbs. So, with that being said, we’ll be doing a lot of rigging, and fabrication of our own contraptions. Some of these will be garden related, some will not. However, most will have a focus on Self Sustainability. We’ll try our best to share our plans (which we don’t normally have) and finished products so that you can replicate them if they fit your particular situation.
As for the gardening, you’ll get to see our different methods of growing our own food. Jeremy uses a raised bed structure that worked very well last year. Mike will be taking his first steps into gardening, and will be tilling up some of his yard and growing some things in containers. Hopefully, at the end of the growing season, we’ll all get together and do some canning/drying/freezing of our surplus so that we can stash it away for the winter months and beyond. We’ll also be practicing some seed-saving techniques, and hopefully doing a bit of “selective breeding” of our plants.
It is important to note, that we’re striving for a very organic system. We’ve done our best to get seeds and plants that are not genetically modified, and come from organic sources. This was a bit of a task, more than it could have been, and we’ll try to get a post together covering what we did. I’m sure some people will find fault with what we did, but hey… we’re new at this and we’ll get better in time. Both of us are using composting methods and we’ll do some posts on that as well.
This should be fun, let’s get started!